Eating turkey, thinking of saving elephants

OK, this isn’t exactly stop-the-presses news, but a study out today (Why on Thanksgiving? Did they know it would be a slow news day?) concludes that increasing anti-poaching patrols in Africa’s Serengeti National Park led to fewer poaching attempts.

What’s most interesting about the work by the University of Washington’s Ray Hilborn is the method he used to come to this conclusion.

Elephant in Serengeti
Photo by Felix Borner

Hilborn examined “catch per unit effort,” a measure that’s been used for years by fisheries researchers like Hilborn. He looked at patrols to control illegal taking of elephants, rhinoceroses and
African buffaloes in the park in Tanzania.

In the fishing realm, researchers look at the number of hours fished and compare it to the number of fish caught to try to estimate abundance. In this case, aerial surveys showed the number of animals increasing as the anti-poaching patrols were stepped up. Says Hilborn:

The animals are ‘telling’ us poaching is down now that there are 10 to 20 patrols a day compared to the mid-1980s when there might be 60 or fewer patrols a year.